This Day in History

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Today is April 19, the 109th day of 2017.

Tripsters will be celebrating Bicycle Day today, commemorating the day that Albert Hofman intentionally ingested 0.25 milligrams of lysergic acid diethylamide, and had to be escorted home by his lab assistant. Since the use of cars was prohibited by wartime restrictions, they rode bicycles.

Today is also Dutch-American Friendship Day, as well as Primrose Day in the U.K., commemorating the anniversary of the death of Benjamin Disraeli.


Events

1892 – Charles Duryea claims to have driven the first automobile in the United States, in Springfield, Massachusetts.

1927 – Mae West is sentenced to ten days in jail for obscenity for her play Sex.

1971 – Charles Manson is sentenced to death (later commuted to life imprisonment) for conspiracy in the Tate–LaBianca murders.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tate%E...Bianca_murders.

1980 - 32 year old English singer Brian Johnson joined Australian group AC/DC, replacing Bon Scott who had died after a drinks binge in February 1980.

1985 – Two hundred ATF and FBI agents lay siege to the compound of the white supremacist survivalist group The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord in Arkansas; the CSA surrenders two days later.

1987 – The Simpsons first appear as a series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show, first starting with Good Night.

1989 – A gun turret explodes on the USS Iowa, killing 47 sailors.

1993 – The 51-day FBI siege of the Branch Davidian building outside Waco, Texas, USA, ends when a fire breaks out. Eighty-one people die.

1995 – Oklahoma City bombing: The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, USA, is bombed, killing 168.

1997 – The 1997 Red River flood overwhelms the city of Grand Forks, North Dakota. Fire breaks out and spreads in downtown Grand Forks, but high water levels hamper efforts to reach the fire, leading to the destruction of 11 buildings.

2005 – Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is elected to the papacy and becomes Pope Benedict XVI.

2013 – Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev is killed in a shootout with police. His brother Dzhokhar is later captured hiding in a boat inside a backyard in the suburb of Watertown.



1787 – Deaf Smith, 1877 – Ole Evinrude, 1903 – Eliot Ness, 1930 – Dick Sargent, 1933 – Jayne Mansfield, 1935 – Dudley Moore, 1942 – Jack Roush (founded Roush Fenway Racing), 1946 – Tim Curry, 1954 – Bob Rock♪ ♫(producer), 1957 – Tony Martin♪ ♫, 1962 – Al Unser Jr., 1965 – Suge Knight♪ ♫, 1968 – Ashley Judd, 1978 – James Franco, 1979 – Kate Hudson



1881 – Benjamin Disraeli, 1906 – Pierre Curie, 1955 – Jim Corbett, 1993 – David Koresh, 2004 – Norris McWhirter, 2005 – Ruth Hussey, 2006 – Albert Scott Crossfield, 2012 – Levon Helm, 2013 – Allan Arbus, 2013 – Al Neuharth (founded USA Today), 2017 – Aaron Hernandez